Can you really love the art without loving the artist?

In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote one of the most important pieces in the philosophy of art. In The Death of the Author, Barthes argued that the meaning of any text is not defined by the author’s intentions. The reader, and the reader alone, decides what a text means. So, it doesn’t matter whether the poet intended the raven as a metaphor for death. If the reader interprets the raven as the repressed libido of a chaste nun, that’s what it is.

Barthes’ argument was predominantly about writing, but is often extrapolated to be about “the death of the artist” more broadly. It doesn’t matter who made a movie or why someone wrote a song — the consumer is king. The audience will enjoy art in their own way, with their own interpretations, and framed within their own biography.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the bestselling author Claire Dederer about the ideas in her book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. While Dederer didn’t explicitly mention Barthes’ essay, her position is radically different: We cannot dismiss the artist behind the art. On the contrary, we have both moral and aesthetic reasons to look very closely at who those artists are.

The union of art and artist

“When I was young, it was very difficult to know people’s biographies,” Dederer tells me. “It was something to be noted when you were able to get your hands on a biography of an artist. And now, of course, it’s completely inescapable because of the way that the internet operates and the way biography has been monetized. In some ways, it’s a very old problem that people have thought about for centuries, but at the same time, it’s a very urgent contemporary problem because of the prevalence of biography and the way that so much of the—you know—the attention economy is actually based on the stories about people.”

Before the internet age, it was rare for most people to know about the lives of the artists behind the art. The artist would have to be either very famous (like The Beatles) or do something seriously monstrous (like Roman Polanski) to have their biography noted. And so, for a lot of the time, you could enjoy the art without even knowing what the artist even looked like.

Today, that’s different. The “attention economy,” as Dederer phrases it, wants you to focus on the whole picture. If you like an author, you find and follow them on social media. If you like a musician, you’re only one Google-drenched night away from finding out every minute detail about their upbringing. If an artist is famous, they’re dragged onto the smiley-happy morning show to chat about their influences. As Dederer puts it in her book, “Now it seems impossible to shake work loose from biography. We swim in biography; we are sick with biography… Everything is everyone’s business.”

The difference it makes to appreciating art

When we learn about the details of an artist’s life, that information doesn’t just sit in your head like some useless trivia to be pulled out at next year’s pub quiz. Those details color how you experience the person’s art. In her book, Dederer refers to this as “the stain.” It’s the rotten aftertaste that infects your artistic enjoyment of some art.

For example, when listening to the Jackson 5, there is often a stain that comes with knowing how the young Jackson children were abused and knowing what Michael Jackson went on to become. It’s hard to watch a Harvey Weinstein movie, read an Ernest Hemingway novel, or listen to Gary Glitter without understanding what Dederer means by the stain.

When Barthes’ essay was written, biographies were often hidden, and “cancel culture” was a thing only for Joseph McCarthy. Today, we know so much about people that this knowledge affects how we respond to an artwork. If the author died in 1967, the internet age has resurrected them and cast them into our living rooms.

How much stain can you live with?

In her book, Dederer argues that we “live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography—that is, everyone alive—is either cancelled or about to be cancelled.” And so, we have two options. Either we limit our art consumption only to those rarefied, squeaky-clean saints who have never put a finger out of place. Or we make peace with how much “stain” we’re willing to accept in our art. For instance, it might be that you feel the stain of a musician’s history of sexual abuse is too much, and so listening to their music is too hard. But it might be that you think the stain of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes is sufficiently diluted to still enjoy Pulp Fiction and Gangs of New York. In both our interview and her book, Dederer appreciates that there is a barrel full of gray surrounding this issue.

There is, however, a situation when the “stain” might actually work the other way. Sometimes, the notoriety or darkness around an artist creates a kind of extra allure. The stories of troubled and broken, fun-loving criminals add to their art. For example, as Dederer told me, “there is a thrill sometimes in the work that might even come from the darkness of the person who made it. Like with Picasso, the brutalism of the maker can inform our thrill at looking at it. The knowledge—that idea that Picasso was this incredibly abusive, virile monster—shaped our idea of what an artist should be. That’s not an accident. There’s some sense in which we want the terrible man to be making the work. There’s a thrill to it. It brings a kind of plot, a story, an added layer of energy. And that absolutely changes the experience.”

The issues surrounding monstrous artists and the stain on their art will not go away soon. As Dederer points out, in an age of biography and insistent transparency, everyone will be shown to have warts and skeletons of some kind. The question is about what you, the audience, can take. And so, it seems that art is not about the artist, nor about even the art, but a fusion or an aesthetico-ethical dance between the artist’s biography and yours.